Super Ferry 9 sinkt vor Zamboanga

[PT-Team]

Und wieder einmal macht Super Ferry negative Schlagzeilen. Der teilweise hoffnungslose Zustand der Seelenverkäufer ist oftmals die Ursache dieser Havarien.

Hier einer der Internationalen Artikel über das Unglück der Super Ferry 9

A ferry carrying nearly 1,000 passengers sank in the southern Philippines early today, leaving at least five people dead and more than 60 missing.

The Superferry 9 began to list before dawn about nine miles off Zamboanga del Norte province, said the coastguard chief, Admiral Wilfredo Tamayo.

Rescuers transferred 900 of the 968 passengers and crewmen to two nearby commercial ships, a navy gunboat and a fishing boat, he said. A search was under way for the missing, who may have drifted in life jackets or been rescued and not yet listed as survivors.

"We really hope they're just unaccounted for due to the confusion," Tamayo said.

Navy ships were deployed and three military aircraft scoured the seas, said the defence secretary, Gilbert Teodoro. US troops providing counterterrorism training to Philippine soldiers in the region deployed a civilian helicopter and five boats, some carrying paramedics.

Teodoro said two men and a child drowned during the scramble to escape the ship. The bodies of two other passengers were recovered from the sea by fishermen, the coastguard said. Three other passengers were injured.

The cause of the incident was not clear. The skipper initially ordered everyone on board to abandon ship as a precautionary step, said Jess Supan, vice-president of Aboitiz Transport System, which owns the ferry.

There were reports that the ferry listed to the right due to a hole in the hull, the National Disaster Co-ordinating Council said. As it tilted, some passengers may have panicked and jumped into the water, the coastguard said.

One passenger, Roger Cinciron, told DZMM radio that he felt the ferry was tilting at midnight but he was assured by a crewman that everything was well. About two hours later, he was roused from sleep by the sound of crashing cargo below his cabin, he said.

"People began to panic because the ship was really tilting," he said by mobile phone as he waited for rescuers to save him and a group of more than 20 other passengers.

The ferry left the southern port city of General Santos on Saturday and had been scheduled to arrive in Iloilo city, in the central Philippines, . There were no signs of possible terrorism, Tamayo said.

Al-Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf militants bombed another Superferry in Manila Bay in 2004, setting off a blaze that killed 116 people, south-east Asia's second-worst terrorist attack.

Sea accidents are common in the Philippine archipelago because of tropical storms, badly maintained boats and weak enforcement of safety regulations. Last year, a ferry overturned after sailing towards a powerful typhoon, killing more than 800 people on board.

In December 1987, the ferry Dona Paz sank after colliding with a fuel tanker in the Philippines, killing more than 4,341 people in the world's worst peacetime maritime disaster.

Mittlerweile hat sich die Zahl der Todesopfer auf 9 erhöht. Unser Mitgefühl allen Angehörigen der Opfer